part0040

That said, while pataphysics has been considered a hoax taken seriously (seen so by Alastair Brotchie in Alfred Jarry, A Pataphysical Life), some pataphysical principles directly come from Jarry having studied at Lycee Henri IV in Paris under the philosopher Henri Bergson. – for example, according to Brochie, the pataphysical principle of the final identity of opposites. Oddly, the same principle – the principle of the final identity of opposites – underlies the rival twin brother conflict which runs all through Joyce’s Finnegans Wake .

In the mid 1990s I sent Robert Anton Wilson a copy of the Pataphysical Calendar. He thanked me and replied saying “September 8 (vulgar era) not only starts the pataphysical new year; it’s also the birthday of both the Virgin Mary and Molly Bloom. Now, a “coincidence” like that absolutely must mean something.” This can be found in the Ithaca and the Lestrygonians episodes of Ulysses . Without going into it deeply, Jarry died when he was 34 years old, the same age as Molly Bloom (who is eternally 34 years old), the voluptuous and unfaithful wife of Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses . During his lifetime Jarry enjoyed boasting that he was born on September 8, the Feast of the of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary in the Catholic calendar.

In Jarry’s novel, Faustroll , Jarry defines pataphysics as the science of the particular and of laws governing exception. Examining this, each scientific law or axiom is challenged by the particular and unique event, entangled in a web of time and space. This brings up Heisenberg’s uncertainty Principle which on the quantum level, precision is fundamentally limited. The science of the particular has its counterpart in Robert Anton Wilson.

While pataphysics revolves around the life of Alfred Jarry, 1873-1907, it was started during a conversation between Oktav Votka and Maurice Saillet which occurred on May 11, 1948 vulg. (22 Palotin 75) during a conversation at Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, on rue de l’Odéon. Incidentally both Adrienne Monnier and Silvia Beach, the proprietor of the bookstore Shakespeare & Co., had bookstores close by, and both had a hand in, promoting and publishing Joyce’s novel, Ulysses on James Joyce’s birthday, February 2, 1922.

During the early 1980s in Paris I became interested in science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and Theodore Sturgeon, Frank Herbert and others. One day I walked into W.H. Smith’s bookshop on rue de Rivoli and discovered Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy – not exactly sci fi genre. It was then bound as three separate paperbacks, The Eye in the Pyramid , The Golden Apple and Leviathan with interesting cover designs. After sitting on the floor in a garret in the Montmartre section of Paris and reading the trilogy for the first time, discombobulating my reality, I wrote to Robert Anton Wilson concerning the sentence:

“Abbie Hoffmann went by just then, talking to Apollonius of Tyana. Were we all in Jarry’s mind or Joyce’s?”

He answered the letter saying maybe we could meet and that he was moving to Dublin.

Eventually I moved out of small living quarters in Montmartre into an apartment near the Luxembourg Gardens. At a party I met Gérard Blanc who told me he had met Robert Anton Wilson in California and was keen on me going to Dublin and doing an interview with Wilson. The interview took place during the celebration of Bloomsday. The day Joyce first went walking with Nora Barnacle on 16 June 1904 and, as well, the day of the action of Joyce’s novel, Ulysses .

At that time Bob and Arlen were living in a suburb of Dublin. I took the train from Gare de Nord in Paris to Cherbourg, Normandy, then a ferry across the channel to Rosslare, Ireland and another train up the coast to Dublin, a bus to Dun Laoghaire, and finally I walked to 5 Sandycove Avenue West, where Bob and Arlen were living.

Intimacy saturated the sea air. Arlen came down the stairs and greeted me at the front door saying. “Is that you, John?” Upstairs in their apartment, the first thing I noticed was Robert Anton Wilson irate on the phone at the local plumber. Arlen making a breakfast of scrambled eggs with coffee and toast.

One could see Martello Tower from the Wilson’s kitchen window. Martello Tower is where Joyce once lived and paid rent to Oliver Saint John Gogarty – an Irish author, poet, athlete and medical student – the prototype for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.

Bob insisted we all go to the Nora Barnacle Pub. On the way Bob pointed across the Dublin bay to the House Power Works and Pigeonhouse Road where Stephen Dedalus walks towards Dublin and very little happens except Stephen Dedalus’s interior dialogue.

We walked to a laundromat along a path and came to a halt at a stone wall; the path got somewhat unnavigable and then it started up again. Bob explained this path was similar to the character of the Irish people.

Bob and Arlen went out of their way and took me around Joyce’s Dublin. We had lunch at the Ormond Hotel and listened to an Irish fiddler at the Siren’s Bar. The Ormond Hotel is the scene of the musical Siren’s episode in Ulysses. We walked along the Liffey River. Later we saw the building that was once Finn’s Hotel where Nora Barnacle once worked as a chambermaid and became Joyce’s companion and later his wife.

During the evening, back at their home, Bob acted out the master mason degree. He closed the apartment door as if a lodge door was secure and guarded and then he described the Hiram Abiff murder and masonic initiation.

Bob showed me the manuscript of the book he was then working on, Coincidance .

The word “Coincidance,” is a Joycean word and signifies the dance of coincidences in nature similar to the Jungian concept of synchronicity, or an acausal event unlikely to occur by mere chance. Bob also gave me a copy of Principia Discordia, cited in The Illuminatus! Trilogy and I gave them a bottle of wine I had brought from Paris.

I took the same trek back to Paris. The Robert Anton Wilson interview was translated into French by Gérard Blanc and published in a French version of Revue CoÉvolution, No 13, summer, 1983, now part of 3d Millénaire.

I kept in touch with Robert Anton Wilson, attending several of his lectures and taking part in his workshop on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

This interview was done in 1983, and in that sense it is a time capsule of that period. Certainly some of Robert Anton Wilson’s ideas would have changed and evolved over time. His enquiring spirit, however, always remains the same.

Wilson : Well, we are looking out the window at the Martello Tower which is where Ulysses began. And Joyce set Ulysses on June 16th, 1904, even though he wasn’t living in the tower then. He moved events around like all novelists do. The real reason he wanted to commemorate June 16th was that’s the day he and Nora first had sex of a sort. He attempted to have sexual intercourse with her and she was not quite ready for that yet, so she masturbated him.

It’s an interesting thing about Joyce that he made that day immortal; the date they actually finally had intercourse, he did not make immortal. I think that June 16th was the first time he had sex with a woman without paying for it so it was a tremendous turning point in his life. I think it convinced him that all Irish Catholic women weren’t hopeless.

Interviewer : You’re now working on a book on Joyce and synchronicity?

Wilson : Yes, the book is called Coincidance which is a word from Finnegans Wake. It combines “coincidence” and “dance.” It’s the dance of synchronicity throughout nature.

Interviewer : The dance of nature is mentioned in The Tao of Physics and, of course, Joyce was very interested in music and especially song.

Wilson : Joyce was the most musical of novelists. There are literally thousands of Irish songs in Finnegans Wake. Almost every sentence has the lilt of song in it. And grand opera runs all through Finnegans Wake too. There are hundreds of operatic songs, along with street ballads, in it.

There are two opposites that keep conflicting all through Finnegans Wake : one represents space and dogma and the other represents time and music. The spaceman is always trying to prove there is something wrong with the timeman. The timeman feels that both of them are necessary and he is not trying to prove that there is something wrong with the spaceman. That’s an interesting aspect of Joyce’s philosophy. He seems to feel that space people are defensive but time people aren’t. The space people, basically, as Joyce sees it, are worshipling status and the time people accept flux and change. As for “coincidance,” the dance of correspondence throughout nature, Joyce learned that from the medieval hermeticists who intrigued him. I think when he was young and first rebelling against the Catholic Church he developed an interest in all the hermetics of the past who had been condemned by the Church and started reading them as well as modern heretics too. He read very widely anarchist and socialist literature because the Church was condemning that at the time when he was young. But he went back and read all the medieval heretics and he got especially interested in Giordano Bruno who was very aware, long before Carl Jung, of the role of synchronicity in nature. And that got Joyce interested in it. And he seems to have noted every coincidence that ever happened to him and put them all into his books.

And it’s very interesting that this somewhat medieval habit of mind, as it appeared to Joyce’s contemporaries, is now very topical because in quantum physics they have discovered that there is a mysterious correspondence in nature that cannot be reduced to cause and effect. That’s the subject of Bell’s Theorem which was published in 1965 by Dr. John S. Bell. And Bell’s theorem has been confirmed several times although the experiments have been questioned. But the most recent confirmation of Bell’s theorem was just published this January. It was performed by Dr. Alain Aspect at the Optical institute at Orsay near Paris. And according to “New Scientist,” Aspect’s experiment was so strict that the critics will have to give up and accept that he has confirmed Bell’s Theorem.

What Bell’s Theorem holds is that two particles that were once in contact will continue to adjust to each other no matter how far apart they move. And that, of course, is the whole basis of hermetic thinking. That’s what’s known as the theory of the magical link. And so, Joyce’s interest in this subject turns out to be not just a recapitulation of medieval heresy but a forecast of where physics was going after Joyce – I find that very interesting. He often claimed he was a prophet.

Interviewer : At one time you were in contact with Timothy Leary. Doesn’t Timothy’s last name, Leary, and also the initial’s L.S.D., don’t they appear in Finnegans Wake ?

Wilson : Oh, yes, the name Leary appears quite often in Finnegans Wake . One reason is that Joyce included all Irish family names; he seemed to have gone through Ireland, county by county, and got every family in there. I’m in there: my grandmother’s family, the O’Lachlanns, are in there. Also, Leary was the high king at the time Saint Patrick arrived. That’s another reason Joyce was fascinated by the Leary clan. And, as for L.S.D., in Ireland in Joyce’s day that meant “pounds, shillings, pence.”

But it is a strange coincidence that the initials L.S.D. appear close to the name Leary several times in Finnegans Wake . It’s an even more amazing coincidence that the Russian general gets killed with an atom bomb in Finnegans Wake and that was published six years before the first atomic bomb went off. There is also a television set in Earwicker’s Pub in Finnegans Wake and television did not appear in Irish pubs until years after Finnegans Wake was published. Also, the name Levin appears a lot in Finnegans Wake and the first person to write a book-length study of Joyce was Harry Levin of Harvard. The study of Joyce is full of astounding coincidences like that. Joyce’s brother died on Bloomsday (June 16) in 1955. And Stan Gebler Davies who wrote one of the biographies of Joyce found out after he finished it that he was living in the same apartment building with Morris Ernst who had been the lawyer who defended Ulysses in the obscenity trial in the United States. Davies says it’s odd how coincidences haunt everybody who writes about Joyce. And I could only say, it certainly is.

I’m writing a book on Joyce and synchronicity and I’m dealing with the bear god, the old Celtic bear god in part of the book. And while I was working on that section a dead bear was found floating in the River Liffey right near Chapelizod where Finnegans Wake is set, which I thought was a rather amazing coincidence. Nobody could explain how the bear got into the river.

Interviewer : I believe etymologically that Arthur, in King Arthur, means bear?

Wilson : Yes, Arthur means bear, and so does Artemis. Artemis was a bear goddess and the title Artemis was Delia and Delia Bacon, a friend of Emerson, appears in Finnegans Wake as the hen who finds the letter in the dung heap. Joyce liked the name Delia Bacon because Delia is Artemis, which brings us back to the bear god; and Bacon ties in with Bacon-and-Shakespeare; and bacon suggests ham, and Ham, being one of the son’s of Noah, brings us back to the flood theme. All the themes in Finnegans Wake are connected to all the other themes by similar chains of puns and coincidences. And bacon and ham suggests breakfast which the dreamer is dreaming about all night. On one level, on every page of Finnegans Wake Earwicker is dreaming about breakfast. So bacon is not only Sir Francis Bacon but part of breakfast and Humpty Dumpty is not only Humpty Dumpty and an orphic egg but it is also part of breakfast.

Interviewer : Yes, there is the theme of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty appearing in Finnegans Wake as a cosmic egg. Do you find that the coincidences are continuing all the time?

Wilson : Oh, yes, the coincidences do go on. I was in London last week and I met a chap by accident in a pub who insisted on giving me a book on the Boyne Valley, the archaeology of Boyne Valley and Newgrange. The author of the book claims that Newgrange was originally in the shape of a giant egg because the ancient Celts, like the ancient Greeks, believed the universe burst out of an egg to start with. And that ties in all through Finnegans Wake . There is the symbolism of Humpty Dumpty and the broken egg as the source of all things. And whether Joyce knew consciously that Newgrange contained that symbolism, or whether he didn’t, is not certain. I think Joyce penetrated to a level of the collective unconscious where all these ancient ideas still exist whether you know them consciously or not.

Interviewer : Finnegans Wake is a dream.

Wilson : It’s a dream, as one critic said, that combines all dreams. You can find every dream you’ve ever had somewhere in Finnegans Wake.

Interviewer : I’d like to move on and ask you about Adam Weishaupt and his connection to the Illuminati of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Who was Weishaupt?

Wilson : Adam Weishaupt was a Jesuit who resigned from the Jesuit order in 1772 and continued at the Catholic university of Ingolstadt as a professor of canon law although he left the church and married. In 1776 he formed a secret order called the Illuminati within the German masonic lodges which were also secret societies. So, he had a secret society within a secret society. In 1785 or 86 the Bavarian government suppressed the Illuminati. After the French Revolution a very reactionary French priest named Abbé Barruel wrote a book claiming that the Illuminati were behind the French Revolution. And shortly after that a Scotch Freemason named John Robinson wrote another book on the same theme, with different evidence, warning English and Scotch Freemasons that the French Freemasons had been infiltrated by the Illuminati and were planning world revolution.

Ever since then there has been a strain of right wing political thought which blames everything in the world on the Illuminati and claims they still continue. I stumbled on this literature in the mid-60s. Most of it is obviously paranoid. It’s full of logical howlers such as only paranoids commit through a strong passion to prove an obsessive case, and I thought it was very funny.

A group of us got involved in spreading the Illuminati conspiracy mythos through the underground press in the States. It was our thought to find out how many of the paranoids who believed in other conspiracy theories could be persuaded to accept this wildly metaphysical and implausible two hundred year old conspiracy.

Well, then I started to find out that it wasn’t all paranoid. The Illuminati really was a very influential organization in its time. I am extremely skeptical that it still exists. But it did play a much larger role in the 18th century than most conventional historians realize. The more you look at it, the more intriguing connections leap out at you.

It’s a fascinating example of something that has happened many times in history. The Molly Maguires were very similar to the Illuminati; they were a secret society within a secret society. There was first the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was and still is allegedly, and I hope, a benevolent organization like many other ethnic organizations: it’s a secret society just to make it more charming and exotic. But within the Ancient Order of Hibernians a separate group formed in the 19th century called the Molly Maguires whose business was assassinating English landlords and committing other atrocities in the cause of Irish liberation.

And it’s happened many other times. It’s a very good revolutionary technique to find a secret society of benevolent intent and form another secret society within it. This recently happened again within Italian Freemasonry. A group split off the major stream of Italian Freemasonry, called themselves P2 and were apparently a fascist takeover of Italy in the 1970s. They were very involved in the Banco Ambrosiano scandals and God knows how influential they were; over 900 members had government posts. And I imagine a hundred years from now orthodox historians will be playing down the importance of P2 and paranoids will be saying it still exists and is responsible for everything happening in the world.

Interviewer : Is it true that many of the Presidents of the United States have been Freemasons?

Wilson : Yeah. I don’t believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

Hitler was a trauma intellectually because of his batty theory of the Elders of Zion plotting to take over Europe; the horrible results of his paranoia created a prejudice about thinking about conspiracies at all. To talk of conspiracy is called the Devil Theory of History and historians make fun of it.

But I tend to agree with the black novelist Ishmael Reed that the history of the world is largely the history of the warfare between secret societies which are conspiratorial in most cases. And even if it is frowned upon by conventional historians, I do see lots of evidence that the Masons and the Knights of Columbus, for instance, are actually battling behind the scenes. In the United States the Masons are tremendously influential. They always have been. I believe it’s documented that all fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence were Masons. Almost all Presidents have been masons. Studies have been done at various times in the Congress and it usually turns out that three quarters of the members of Congress are Masons. J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the Secret Police for forty years, was a Mason.

There is no doubt that the United States is largely a Masonic country. Yet, at the same time, the Knights of Columbus who have been there for over a hundred years have been conspiring too. There was a point in which Hollywood movies were controlled by Catholic censorship. They finally did get a Catholic into the White House. There are all sorts of conspiracies going on all the time. I think Carl Oglesby is right: that the western millionaires in the United States are continually fighting with the yankees or eastern millionaires. And the British, I think, are among the arch-conspirators in the world. MI5 is very efficient – that’s what John Le Carré calls the circus – and I don’t think a third of what they do has ever been revealed to the public. As Britain has declined as a political imperial power, they have gotten more and more into achieving their goals by clandestine means. They are very very clever at it.

In sum, I don’t believe the people who say that the world is controlled by one vile group of conspirators who are running everything, but I believe there are actually a multitude of conspiracies contending in the night.

And I think it’s very stupid behavior, too, because conspiracies decrease human intelligence which is the function of precise and open communication. But I do think conspiracy is a factor. There is a lot of contemporary history that cannot be understood unless you assume a multitude of conspiracies, all somewhat stupid at times.

Interviewer : What do you say about behind the scene alliances?

Wilson : Oh yes, there are also attempts at alliances too. Recently in Ireland, for instance, quite openly the Freemasons and the Knights of Columbus have been having joint meetings. They are trying to see if they can end their feud and work together.

And the Bilderbergers is an alliance that meets every year – representatives of big banking families, a few old royal families in Europe and some delegates from the Communist nations meet every year. They are called the Bilderbergers because their first meeting was at the Hotel Bilderberg in Arnhem, Holland. A lot of people are very paranoid about them. My guess about them is that they’re not quite a coherent group; they’re an attempt to form a coherent group among various conspiracies that are working against each other most of the time. But they get together once a year to see if they can work together. I am all in favor of it. In that particular case, I think if the Communists and the Bankers and Prince Bernhard, and so on, if they can get together and agree on a few things, the chances of nuclear war decreases. I’m not against that at all. I wish they could agree more.

Interviewer : How did you first become interested in the Illuminati, which is, as you say, a secret society within a secret society?

Wilson : Well, that goes back so far it’s hard to remember. Basically it started when a friend of mine named Kerry Thornley got indicated by Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans, as a co-conspirator in the Kennedy assassination. Now, nobody indicated by Garrison was ever convicted, and Garrison is generally regarded as an unscrupulous demagogue now. But at the time it was pretty frightening to Kerry and, as a matter of fact, Kerry has never recovered from it. He was under such emotional strain that he finally got to believe it himself, and decided that all of his friends were in a conspiracy to frame him. He broke up with all his friends in an extremely suspicious state of mind. But at the time when it was first starting I just happened to be reading Daraul’s A History of Secret Societies , I don’t know why. I mentioned it in a letter to Kerry. And the next thing I knew Kerry had made up a letterhead saying BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI, The World’s Oldest And Most Successful Conspiracy. And he was writing to all the Kennedy assassination buffs on that, confessing his role in the assassination in very sarcastic terms. He still had a sense of humor then. That was before it really got to him. Somehow or other, some other people who knew Kerry got involved in this and we were all writing for the underground press at that time in various parts of the States. So we all started writing little pieces about the Illuminati conspiracy as if we believed in it. And after that Bob Shea said to me one day, “You know, this is a good theme for a novel.” So that’s how the book got started. We never expected the novel to be so long. We thought it would be a short novel and we would dash it off in a couple of months. After we got rolling, we spent two years on it and it got longer and longer and it turned into a general satire on everything we found frightening and contemptible in the world, political extremes and hate groups of all sorts. It turned into a diatribe against the insanity of the human race.

Interviewer : You were at that time working at Playboy, I believe.

Interviewer : And a lot of mail that came into Playboy, especially the paranoid letters that were too far out to publish, were they used for Illuminatus?

Wilson : All magazines with a large circulation regularly get mail from crackpots who think the magazine will print their theories. I’ve known a lot of magazines, and it’s a standing joke; they call it the crackpot file. Shea and I started taking things out of the crackpot file and looking them up. People would say, “if you’d only read this book, you’d find out the truth.” So we’d have the Playboy library order the book for us and we’d read it. So we got to read a great deal of crackpot literature – left wing and right wing. We just incorporated it all. We made a mega-conspiracy theory that contained all the other conspiracy theories.

Then I began to discover something about synchronicity and the imagination. Some of the most absurd things that we invented turned out to be true, and that really blew my mind. I got a bright idea one day, reading a right wing pamphlet about the Beatles being Communist agents, and I wrote a section of Illuminatus about Beethoven being an illuminati agent. Well, it turned out that, although you can’t prove it exactly, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence to support my fantasy. Beethoven’s first music teacher, when he was a teenager, was a member of the Illuminati. Beethoven arrived in Vienna with letters from this Illuminati member to other Freemasons introducing Beethoven. People who knew Beethoven said they saw him exchange the Masonic handshake with other people at times. Beethoven’s first major composition, The Emperor Joseph Cantata, was commissioned by the Illuminati. They wanted to commemorate Emperor Joseph because he was a big hero to them for two reasons: A) he legalized masonry in Austria, and B) he made the Catholic Church get out of the education business. He was an illuminated monarch to the Illuminati and they commissioned Beethoven to write a cantata about his death. So, if you put all that together, then you can say that you haven’t proven that Beethoven was a member of the Illuminati but that he was a fellow traveler. That absolutely blew my mind because I thought I had made that up out of thin air before I stumbled on the evidence in Maynard Solomon’s biography of Beethoven. Mozart was also pretty tight with the Illuminati, interestingly enough. The Magic Flute is a masonic initiation turned into an opera; any Mason will tell you that. But it has Illuminati ideas in it too.

Interviewer : There was a theatrical production of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which I believe was given in Seattle, in Germany and in Israel. Could you talk a little about that?

Wilson : It was done first in Liverpool and then it went to the National Theatre in London, and I got to appear on the stage on opening night. I was one of the extras in the Black Mass scene. And it amused me that there I was shouting “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen. I don’t think she realized what she was patronizing. Sir John Gielgud, to my great delight, played the computer. He did a recording of the lines the computer speaks. And he didn’t have to show up every night. They just played the tape when the computer was supposed to speak. But it was delightful – John Gielgud’s voice doing my lines. I loved that. And then it went to the Round House Theatre in London. Later on it was done at Cambridge University for one weekend, and in Seattle, and Frankfurt, Germany, and most recently it was done in Jerusalem in Hebrew. Now, there is another production scheduled in Munich for this fall. They expect they will be able to bring me over to Munich to do interviews for pre-publicity for it. I’m looking forward to that.

Right now the movie rights are under option from a company in London called Golden Dawn Productions. They have made several television series and one previous film. They told me that as soon as they picked the name Golden Dawn, they started getting weird calls from people who wanted to know how to join the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult secret society of the 1890s. And they had to explain, “We’re not magicians, we’re just a film company.”

Interviewer : What were some of the reactions to the stage production of Illuminatus ?

Wilson : Well, it’s a curious thing, in Liverpool it got marvelous showers of praise which did me a lot of good since I was flat broke at the time the production opened, and it encouraged me to go on writing. It went on to London and got excellent reviews there too, which made me feel better. Oddly enough, when it got to Seattle, Washington, every critic in Seattle panned it. I don’t quite understand that. I don’t think the production was inferior to the English production. I think the critics in Seattle are just not prepared for something of that nature. I think when a critic is baffled, he becomes angry. And since a great deal baffles them, they are usually angry.

I regard criticism as a modern form of public execution. The public used to have the delight of seeing somebody hanged twice a week. That was the chief entertainment in earlier ages. As we have gotten civilized (ha ha ha), this is no longer acceptable to society. And now they do it to artists. You can see the sadism in the attacks on some artists, such as the semiannual crucifixion of Norman Mailer by the New York literary critics. There is a great similarity to the public execution: Mailer sticks his head up and dares to utter another book and they all come running with clubs, sabers and other weapons to ritually tear the books apart. I’m amused by it because Mailer is tough enough to take it, and the books sell and make a lot of money so he can afford to laugh at the critics. But it does get pretty vicious at times. I think a lot of science fiction writers who don’t make much money, don’t have that consolation. I think a lot of them have really been hurt by critics. I’ve seen them in really depressed states of mind. It’s rather hard. When you’re not making a lot of money out of your writing and all you get is abuse in print, you tend to think, “Why the hell should I go on,” and start looking for a job selling shoes in a store.

Interviewer : Your work seems to have a little to do with science fiction. It has moved off by itself towards something entirely different. I believe you call it Guerrilla Ontology. Could you explain what that is?

Wilson : Well, Guerrilla Ontology is a term I coined several years ago. I recently found out that Edward de Bono has been teaching the same sort of thing for many years. He calls it lateral thinking . What it amounts to is: most thinking is a continuation from your initial premise and you draw more and more conclusions which is the way a system of mathematics develops. But mathematicians discovered over a hundred years ago that there is another way of thinking: that’s to start off from a different set of assumptions and build up a different system which is what de Bono calls lateral thinking. It’s to get out of the set created by your original assumptions and move sideways, as it were, and start from different assumptions and build a different system. That’s what I’m always doing in my books. I call it Guerrilla Ontology. It was only a few weeks ago that I discovered that de Bono has been teaching this as a problem-solving technique for many years and calls it lateral thinking.

I think it is something we badly need, whatever you call it. Korzybski called it non-Aristotelian logic in the 30s but he hasn’t had much of an impact. I think that’s part of the reason my books are often misunderstood. I think anybody who has read Korsybski or de Bono will have no trouble with my books; they’d see what I’m doing.

But quite frequently I get very pained letters from very sincere people asking, “What the hell do you mean?” They can’t realize that I’m trying to get beyond yes and no and show alternatives, what de Bono calls po thinking. Yes is yes, no is no, and po is let’s consider it. And that’s what I’m always doing. Quite often people write naive letters of great emotional pain, saying “Are we supposed to believe it or not?” And the answer is, from my point of view, you’re not supposed to believe anything: you’re supposed to think about it. Of course, there is a big influence on me, not just from General Semantics and Korzybski, but also from modern physics which has always been a hobby of mind. Since the 1920s quantum physics has given up talking about “truth.” You hardly ever hear physicists utter the word “truth.” They don’t even use the word theory anymore; they prefer the word model. And the General approach is: which model is most useful right now? Your assumption is that there will be a better model in a couple of years. They are doing what de Bono calls lateral thinking and Korzybski calls non-Aristotelian thinking and I call Guerrilla Ontology.

Another major influence on me was the Surrealists. I think of all the art movements of the twentieth century, the others may have produced greater art at times, but I don’t think any movement is more revolutionary and more exciting than Surrealism, even sixty years after it was created. The basic effort of the Surrealists to break down conditioned consciousness and open the mind to alternatives is to me one of the great cultural events of our century. I find great inspiration in their paintings and their early writings, and in a lot of their slogans. I think it was Breton who advocated, total transformation of mind and all that resembles it.

They attempted to dissolve the boundary between art and life; that’s something I’m always doing too. That’s why my books have a peculiar quality. They sometimes frighten naive readers. Some readers send me letters indicating that they have been extremely terrified; they have what William James called negative conversion experiences . On the other hand, other readers find it all hilarious and liberating. I got a letter from an ex-Moonie who said after he quit the Unification Church – which is a very totalitarian organization – after he quit, he was paranoid. He said for weeks he was sure they were going to come and get him, that he couldn’t escape them, and that they would drag him back and force him to submit again. He said after reading Illuminatus! he laughed so much that he got over his paranoia. And that really delighted me because that was the intent of the book, to get people over such fears. And yet, other people are so scared by it they can’t laugh – they practically freak out. That’s because in all of my books I use the technique which is also used by Frederick Forsyth in much more conventional novels. It amuses me that Forsyth and I are using the same technique. We invented it independently – the technique of mixing in so many real facts that the reader is genuinely confused as to how much of it is real. He or she will say, if they read the newspapers, “My God, a lot of this is true.” And I like to get the reader into that state of wondering if this much is true, how much of the rest of it is true. That’s what I mean by Guerrilla Ontology; it’s getting people to think, giving them puzzles that force them to think.

Interviewer : What’s put on and what isn’t?

Wilson : I want the reader to ask every couple of pages, “How much of this is put on?” As for the critics who don’t like me, they generally admit that my books are humorous, although if they don’t like the books, they refer to them as undergraduate humor or juvenile humor. That adds to the mystery, of course. There are two factors working all the time. The books are obviously humorous, so that means I can’t be serious. Yet, at the same time, the books are full of real facts and very disturbing connections between the facts, so my God, I must be serious about some of it. So the reader is continually whiplashed back and forth between laughing and thinking “Maybe this is all true after all.” In that way I can introduce the most radical ideas from futuristic science and the most radically philosophical types of doubt and questioning of basic assumptions together with political exposé, and so on, into a collage that I believe genuinely forces the reader to think and to wonder because I really am trying to break down the boundary between art and life. I want the reader to be affected and not just entertained – to be seriously disturbed and provoked, involved and not say, “It’s only art, it’s only literature.”

Interviewer : In film there is montage, in painting collage. You’ve pointed out that writing today is retrograde compared with other art forms, that the medium of writing is usually linear.

Wilson : Well, I think it’s certainly true that writing is regressive compared to other arts in our time. I’m inclined to blame the publishers. I think writers would be a lot more innovative and experimental and would catch up and become contemporary with the other arts except that it is so difficult to get anything published that’s at all experimental. And so, even people who have done very experimental work, like William S. Burroughs, tend to write more conventionally as they go along because they just discover it’s hard to get their experimental works into print. There is a new anthology of Burroughs’ work that just came out recently which has an introduction in which the introducer says that Burroughs has stated quite frankly that it was commercial considerations that led him to cut down the amount of cutups in his books. Publishers have always been chiefly mercantile, of course, but it’s getting worse as the cost of printing goes up and book production gets more expensive. They are less and less interested in anything chancy. What publishers are most interested in is a guaranteed bestseller. The further you depart from the formula, the more nervous they get and the harder it is to get published. So writers, in so far as they have any sense of survival at all, tend to become more cautious and less experimental. And it’s happened to me; I have made efforts to be more conventional. Of course, it does not always work. If you have an unconventional mind, your books tend to be unconventional no matter how hard you try to be conventional. But it is hard to sell anything that’s the least bit avant-garde or experimental.

Interviewer : Didn’t you make a connection between Burroughs’ Naked Lunch and Joyce’s Ulysses very early in your career?

Wilson : Yes. A long part of Naked Lunch was published in a magazine called Big Table in 1958. I bought that magazine because it had something of Kerouac in it. And then I started reading Burroughs and I thought, “Oh, my God, Kerouac doesn’t begin to compare with this guy.” And the first thing I said to my wife after reading it was, “You’ve got to look at this, this man is the greatest prose stylist since James Joyce,” and I still think so.

Interviewer : You’ve read a lot of mystery stories, especially Raymond Chandler. And you seem to like his way of showing how different strata of society are linked and interconnected.

Wilson : I find Chandler fascinating chiefly as a stylist. He never writes a dull sentence. I think that’s what every writer should aim for. I find it a fascinating paradox that Chandler is writing in what’s regarded as bargain basement literature. Chandler said a detective story writer is considered one step up from the mulatto. I find it fascinating that working in that field, he wrote better sentences than a lot of novelists who are considered serious.

I am also interested in Chandler as a social realist. He gives you in every book a kind of encyclopedia of American sociology and shows how the different classes are intertwined; how organized crime is part of the mosaic that affects every other part. So I think his work has considerable sociological interest.

But I’ve read a lot of detective stories. I’m a big fan of John Dickson Carr, who does not have any of the literary values of Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But I don’t think one always wants literature; one wants to relax sometimes. And I like puzzles, so I’ve read almost all of John Dickson Carr’s books just because they are such damn good puzzles. I always try to solve them before the end. It’s a lot of fun. And Carr has influenced me too; my books are constructed as puzzles. I’ve learned a lot from Carr about how to put things right out in the open where the reader doesn’t see them. They are there. But if you do it right, the reader won’t see them and won’t know what you are leading up to. I learned as much about surprise from Carr as I did say from O. Henry because Carr always plays fair – all the clues are there.

Interviewer : What are your writing plans for the future?

Wilson : At present, I am involved very slightly with a projected British television show. I hope to be getting more involved. This is a science show for children. It fascinates me to try to communicate complex scientific ideas in the simplest way possible so children can understand them.

And I’m working on a book on synchronicity in Finnegans Wake which I suspect is very non-commercial, so I’ve got to find some other things to do. I’m working on a couple of plays I hope to get produced. Meanwhile, Bob Shea, the co-author of Illuminatus, and I are discussing starting a new novel together. I think that’ll be very commercial. If you are not independently wealthy, trying to write what you consider important is a constant juggling act. You’ve got to decide, how much time do I have to put into really serious work and how much do I have to do what’s purely commercial just to keep eating. And so, I’m constantly balancing these different factors.

Interviewer : Just a few days ago the Pioneer Spacecraft left our solar system and, in a sense, mankind has now left the solar system.

Wilson : Well, actually we got out of the solar system quite a while ago when radio signals left the solar system, around 1900 humanity started leaving the solar system in a sense. And so, in a more specific sense, anybody out there who has been picking up our radio signals has been learning a lot about us for several decades now. And of course, they have been picking up TV signals. But people in the vicinity of Barnard’s Star, if there are any – and there is a wide suspicion that Barnard’s Star has at least one earth like planet – people at Barnard’s Star are picking up television shows from as recently as 1976 as well as the radio signals they have been picking up for decades now. So they might know quite a bit about us if they are interested and if they are there. God knows what they think of the Gong Show.

Interviewer : How far away is Barnard’s Star?

Wilson : It’s around 7 or 8 light years away.

Interviewer : In the early 70s you became interested in the star Sirius. Isn’t it believed that Sirius contacted the Dogon tribe in Africa?

Wilson : That’s the thesis of Robert K.G. Temple’s book, The Sirius Mystery.

Interviewer : He’s quite a rigorous scientist from what I understand.

Wilson : It’s a very well argued book. It’s much more plausible than a lot of books of that type such as those of von Danikan, who always turns out to be inaccurate if you check him. Temple has quite a respectable argument. I won’t say that he has proven his case but he has made it plausible.

He doesn’t claim the Dogon were contacted but that their ancestors were. He thinks their ancestors came from Sumer around 4500 B.C.

Isn’t it odd that Gurdjieff claimed his tradition came from Sumer around 4500 B.C. and that the Gurdjieff schools are full of mystical references to Sirius? I find that a very interesting coincidence indeed, talking about coincidences.

Interviewer : Would you talk a little about intelligence increase which is contained in Timothy Leary’s formula SMI2 LE?

Wilson : Well, SMI2 LE is Leary’s slogan for space migration, plus intelligence increase, plus life extension. It’s an interesting formula because, if you want to look at it this way, we all live in a triangle of space, time and consciousness. How much space can we travel through? How much time do we have? And how conscious are we of what’s going on? The whole direction of evolution seems to be to produce beings that have much more space, more time and more consciousness.

In the primate family that we belong to, for instance, the most recent ones live longer than the earlier ones. The average life span of the human race has also been increasing ever since we have been keeping records, and it’s increased even in this century. It’s increased in the Western World from an average of 50 years in 1900 to 72 1/2 years in 1980. A lot of gerontologists believe that we are on the edge of a major breakthrough of not only slowing down but actually reversing the aging process. It’s not only possible but quite likely that in the next ten or fifteen years we will have the knowledge to extend the human life span way beyond the extensions it’s had already. Various researchers talk about extending the life span 150 or 400 years. There are different guesses about how far we can extend it. Of course, once we start expanding it, that means that some of us will be around for three or four generations of more scientific research which means that many more expansions can happen that we can’t even conceive of now. And that’s the L.E. part of SMI2 LE life extension.

And the S.M. part doesn’t stand for what it means in the underground papers, it means space migration. We have already started leaving this planet. The Russians are putting people up for longer and longer periods. At Princeton University Gerard O’Neill has designed colonies that can hold up to 4,000 people, and it seems quite possible that these colonies are going to be built in the next 30 years. So people will be leaving this planet and liv(I2 )ng elsewhere, and that’s also an evolutionary trend. You find most animals never get more than 30 miles from where they are born. (There are some that travel quite a bit further like storks who fly from Africa to Northern Europe. You know, there are exceptions.) But most animals never get more than 30 miles from where they were born. And most human beings throughout history never have gone any further. In this century there are more and more people traveling longer and longer distances. It’s not at all uncommon these days to be at a party in San Francisco or New York or London or Tokyo and find people who have been in thirty countries or sixty countries. You can meet people who have been in a hundred countries. So, we always have been moving further and further into space. And quite a lot of us are going to be moving off the surface of this planet. I think a large part of the human race will be off this planet in the next 50 years.

And therefore, we have space migration and life extension as very probable trajectories of where we are going. Intelligence increase or I2 , the middle part of SMI2 LE, is Leary’s peculiar emphasis. He points out that psychology has never been a science; it’s always been groping in the dark. But it is advancing, like the other sciences. He feels that in the next ten, twenty or thirty years psychology will become a true science, in the sense that we can then change anything about ourselves we want to change. We will have the knowledge; we will have the techniques. He thinks we’ve got some of them already. And it will be possible to tune our nervous system to different levels of consciousness and intelligence at will.

That means a complete break with all past evolution because human beings, as they currently exist with a few exceptions, are very much what the behaviorists say – we are very much like any other animal: easily conditioned, mechanically trapped in repeating reflex actions, and that includes not just our behavior but our consciousness too. We all have what Leary calls conditioned consciousness. That is, our minds have been conditioned that only some things are possible to us where as the human mind theoretically should be capable of doing anything that any other human being has ever done. But most people are very limited. With the true science of psychology, when it becomes a science, it should be possible for you to master anything that any other human being has mastered from higher mathematics, to writing symphonies, to karate, to judo, to water skiing, to being an engineer, to becoming a choreographer of ballet, to making contributions to physics equal to those of Einstein. And especially, you should be able to change any compulsive behavior that depresses you and has bothered you all your life and you don’t know how to get rid of it. All that should be possible. You should be able to reprogram your own nervous system in any way you want.

We are beginning to have that technology. For instance, biofeedback makes it possible to get into yoga meditation and tranquillity very easily compared to what yoga used to be. It used to be years to make any progress at all. With biofeedback you can make a lot of progress in two or three weeks.

And we know a lot through the drug revolution of the sixties. We’ve found out about consciousness – sometimes pleasantly and sometimes unpleasantly. Most of the panic about the misuse of drugs obscures the fact that all crazy underground experiments are part of an emerging pattern of what can be very intelligent, scientific use of chemicals to change the parameter of the nervous system. The number of people on tranquilizers today must be fantastic. And I don’t think that’s just a sign of the tension of our times. I think it’s a natural thing. If you have a technology that’ll solve your problem, why not use it? I am not sure tranquilizers solve problems but they ameliorate them. And there are mental illnesses that are routinely being cured with drugs, such as manic depressive psychosis. I think something like three quarters of all manic depressives can be cured with one simple drug. Some types of schizophrenia, which is the worst disease known to therapists, are cured. It has happened that drugs have been announced as cures and it turned out that they only worked on a minority. But you’ve got to remember that twenty years later the real drug came along in most cases. Smallpox has been abolished. The number of diseases which have been abolished is astonishing.

Interviewer : One of your interests is human evolution – what is really happening and where are we headed? You seem to try to get your readers to change their state of consciousness.

Wilson : Evolutionary psychology plays a large role in my thinking. One of my favorite paintings is Paul Gauguin’s What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Those are the basic questions really. The totem pole, for instance, is an attempt to answer that. That’s the way the Northwest Indians answer – by building a totem pole which tells where they came from, where they are and where they are going. And a modern treatise of sociobiology or ethology is also trying to answer those questions in a more scientific way. I think everybody asks those questions in every society.

All my books deal with the future, as well as the past and the present, because I am continually wondering about what humanity is about – where we are going. We are obviously domesticated primates. That’s palpably obvious now. 98% of our DNA is the same as chimpanzee DNA. You can see all the typical primate behavior in any human city. I find it fascinating to walk around observing how many chimpanzee behaviors I can see on an average street.

And yet, at the same time, we are more than primates: we are evolving into something else. Nietzsche is one of my favorite philosophers because he was the first one to raise that question. I think he was the only one to understand the full impact of Darwin. Most biologists have not really understood the philosophical impact of Darwin as deeply as Nietzsche did because Nietzsche’s whole concept of abyss is that we do not know what we are becoming. All of Nietzsche’s books are asking, “My god, what are we becoming?” We are becoming something else. Everything Nietzsche attacked – all the political and religious ideas that he devoted his polemical energies to ridiculing and mocking and challenging – all of these things are attempts to define what we are and keep us in place. Nietzsche was trying to knock them over so we would realize we don’t know what we are, and what we are becoming. He was quite willing, as I am, to open up frightening possibilities just to make people think. So were the Surrealists; they opened a lot of frightening possibilities.

In the very real sense we are, as the Buddhists say, a void. We are empty. We can become anything. Most people have very strong armors to prevent themselves from realizing the void. It’s frightening. But once you’ve accepted the void, you realize you can become anything. You can fill the void with anything you want, if you have the psychological techniques to do it.

Interviewer : You’ve talked about loops. How does one break out of his or her loop and change their reality?

Wilson : By doing what you’re afraid of. That is one of my basic principles – progress is only made by what Kierkegaard called a leap in the dark. He had a different meaning than me, now that I think of it; he didn’t mean quite what I mean. He leaped into a very snug, safe place. But the real leap in the dark is to try to find out what has conditioned you all your life and how much of that you can kick over, and try to become your own opposite.

Getting back to Nietzsche, I think that’s really what Nietzsche was trying to do. I think one of the funniest things about Nietzsche is the realization that he was a very shy, timid, celibate man who was so nervous and sensitive he couldn’t even drink coffee, much less alcohol. Most of Nietzsche’s books are an attempt to shake himself up. He was also a very compassionate man. He had volunteered to serve as an orderly in the ambulance corps during the Franco-Prussian war. He was a very sensitive man. So all this raving and ranting about the blond beast who tramples on everybody is just an attempt to become his own opposite: which is worth trying, if you don’t go too far with it. There comes a point beyond which you’ve got to return to common sense.

Interviewer : Talking about people who get caught in their own belief system, they sometimes perpetuate ideas that later appear stupid. You once mentioned a scientist who tried to prove heavier than air vehicles would never fly.

Wilson : Oh, that was Simon Newcomb. He was a great astronomer. He discovered the planet Neptune. He was a very competent man in his own field. He made lots of important discoveries too. but that last dummheit of his just demonstrates how all of us can get trapped in our own conceptual systems. The funny thing about his proof that heavier than air objects couldn’t fly is that birds are heavier than air and they fly. But once you’re trapped in a certain system of thinking, you ignore obvious facts like that.

Interviewer : You, yourself, have frequently brought up what many people consider a crackpot idea: for instance, physical immortality. Why?

Wilson : I’m fascinated by the philosophy of immortalism which began in the 1960s. Actually you can trace it back to the 18th century. Ben Franklin was the first one to have the idea that with the advance of science we could achieve immortality. But it really started as a serious movement in the 1960s.

I not only find it a stimulating and provocative idea but I find it fascinating that it is so unthinkable to most people. And, when I get a lecture engagement, I always bring up immortalism just because I want to check if I’m going to get the same responses from this audience as I’ve gotten from every other audience. And sure enough, there are always some people in the audience who are not only opposed to the idea but are rather emotionally opposed to it. They’re afraid to think about it.

I think, pragmatically or experimentally, if you were to take any person on the planet and say, “Do you want to live twenty-four hours more,” they’d say, “Yes.” So I think any day, everybody would want to live longer, except those with terminal illness. And yet, the idea of having the same choice indefinitely really disturbs them.

I believe that’s only because it’s an unconventional idea. It breaks down our whole conditioned system. The first thing you learn in a logic class is the syllogism, “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” And to knock that one over really disturbs people and I find it fascinating that they are disturbed because I don’t think they really want to die; they just don’t want to think a new thought.

How probable it is, is hard to say. I find more and more gerontologists – the experts who do the research as distinguished from geriatricians who treat the aging – you will find more and more of them, from the 1950s to the present, talking about knowing more and more about what causes aging. The obvious corollary which more and more of them have been saying since the 60s is pretty soon they will know how to reverse it. It’s a very obvious thing chemically. When you understand what causes a biochemical process, you can figure out how to stop it or how to reverse it. And so, it’s very likely longevity is coming in the near future. I don’t know how soon. There are a lot of optimistic predictions that have come from researchers. Some think they will have it by the end of this decade. Some put it a little further in the future. I don’t know when it is really coming.

I think when it does come, the people who are absolutely opposed to the idea of physical immortality will decide that if there is a pill available in the drugstore that will make them live longer, they will take it. But it is the idea that is shocking to them.

I don’t know if I would want to live forever. There might come a point beyond which boredom sets in. So to me, immortalism is really a challenging idea more than something I take literally.

It’s indefinite life extension that interests me. I personally would like to have indefinite life extension. If there was a pill that I could take that would guarantee I could go on for another twenty years, I would take it. And then I would take it again and keep on taking it for quite a while. But I don’t know how long that would go on. Maybe after 28,000 years I would say, “O.K., let’s try death and see if there in something on the other side.” Or after 56,000 years maybe.

Interviewer : Do you think that boredom has something to do with the oncoming of death?

Wilson : Oh, definitely. I also think it has a great deal to do with loneliness. People tend to die after their companions die; there is a marked tendency for that. A few people live a long time beyond their mates, but a shocking number of people die within six months after their husband or wife. And boredom is a factor – the breaking up of a pattern that has gone on for decades leads to boredom. Boredom is mostly caused by not doing what you want to do which is caused by not knowing what to do or not knowing how to get out of a situation that you are in. People are bored with things that would excite other people just because it’s not what they want to do. People do most daydreaming when they are working on tasks they don’t like so they are daydreaming about doing something else. That’s what they describe as boredom. I think that tends to increase with age because most people are trapped, as I said, in repeating tape loops. And once again, I think until the longevity pill comes along, the best guarantee of life is to keep doing new things, especially things that frighten you. Jump out of your reality tunnel to another reality tunnel. On a very simple level, move to a foreign country.

Interviewer : It seems civilization has been moving more and more westward and perhaps has now ended up in California.

Wilson : Well, as for western migration, that’s one of the most fascinating trajectories in history. It was first noticed by Sir William Temple in the 18th century. The next one that I know of who noticed it was Brooks Adams, an American historian in the 1890s. I have correlated it with some statistics by the French economist, Georges Anderla, in a report he did for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development back in 1974. Using information theory, he estimated how many bits of information humanity possessed at 1 A.D., and then he calculated how long it took that to double: and that took 1500 years, the next doubling came by 1750, the next double by 1900, the next by doubling by 1950, the next by 1960, the next by 67, the next by 73 – at which point Anderla completed his report. I assume it’s doubled twice more since then, if not quadrupled, since it is an accelerating function.

Now, If you look at those years and ask where most of the creativity was going on and where the information was being processed: in 1 A.D. – aside from the great civilization in China at the time – most of it in the western world was being processed through Rome. But it’s obvious that before that most of the information was being processed through Greece which is east of Rome. You go back a little further and you can see that the first nine chemical elements were all discovered in Asia. From 1 A.D. on, all the chemical elements were discovered in Europe. And so, the accumulation of knowledge was moving westward and mildly northward. And if you look at 1500 when knowledge had doubled, there is no doubt that the intellectual center of the world was northern Italy around Florence and the other great city states where the Renaissance was occurring. All the information was coming from the Arabians translating the classics. Aristotle was being retranslated by way of the Arabs, and all the new innovations were going on in Europe. And it was all being processed through those great Renaissance universities and the largest accumulation of wealth was in the hands of the Italian banking houses.

You jump forward to 1750, you can see as the knowledge doubled, the center of learning moved north and west to England. The English Empire between 1750 and 1900 was the empire on which the sun never set. It was bigger than the Roman Empire. It was the first worldwide empire.

By the time you get to 1900, the next doubling of knowledge, was the Eastern Seaboard of the United States which was getting more and more important. The decline of the British Empire happened in the next fifty years during the next doubling of knowledge. Between 1900 and 1950 the British Empire collapsed and the American rose. Also, between 1900 and 1950, the center where most of the information was being processed moved from London to New York and New England – the axis from Princeton University to Harvard. By 1960 it has started to shift to California. By 1967 there was no doubt it was in California. All the chemical elements since the ninety-third have been discovered in California. The computer industry started in the Eastern United States and immediately leaped to California and made its greatest advances there. The space industry moved from Alabama to Texas, and now most of it is in California. By 1967 the Japanese were becoming the main contenders to California.

This process of western movement began in Thailand with the creation of bronze, the first alloy, which was the beginning of the Bronze age. What began in Thailand, moved across Asia, through Egypt and Greece, to Rome, to the Renaissance universities, to English, to Harvard-Princeton-and-Yale, to California, to Japan; now it is a worldwide process.

If you look at the growth of political organisms from the tribal state, to the first large agricultural civilizations, to the great industrial civilizations, this westward movement is obviously becoming a worldwide planetary process. We’re evolving to a bigger political unit than we’ve ever had before. So the European Economic Community is just a beginning of something that I think is more and more going to be happening. Whether chauvinists like it or not, I think we are headed towards world government, or something like world government.

Real capital has been doubling all through this process. We are headed towards becoming a richer world-round civilization and more scientifically advanced than any in the past and with longer lived people and, I think, smarter people than ever before.

Interviewer : In the next 40 years the rate of change will have accelerated more and more rapidly?

Wilson : That’s another thing Georges Anderla, the French economist, points out: all the rates of change from previous society have been accelerating throughout history. It is an astonishing acceleration by itself. But there is no reason to think that the rate of acceleration, as fast as it is, is not going to continue. It is going to accelerate faster because with computers everything is happening faster. There are problems in science where it has estimated it would take thousands of years to work out of the alternatives (unless somebody had a stroke of inspiration or intuition and saw through the problem). Some of those problems have been solved already with computers in less than a day! So acceleration is itself going to accelerate tremendously.

Interviewer : Aren’t there different rates of change in different fields?

Wilson : Yes. In aviation there is only about four years between the discovery of a principle and its application throughout the aviation industry. In electronics it’s about two years. In house building it’s about fifty years between a new principle and its large scale application.

Interviewer : What do you envision for language? Will there be a synthesis of all languages or an adaptation on one artificial language?

Wilson : Literal artificial languages like Esperanto and Ido, and so on, have never caught on because the time wasn’t right for them. They were premature. My hunch, and it’s just a hunch, is that they are not going to catch on. I think the international language will emerge organically from computer networking. It will be a computer language.

I imagine in thirty years everybody will have a computer. Worldwide networking will be common place. So people in Japan, France, Peru, Canada will be communicating in computer language, probably something very more sophisticated than FORTH. They will still have their national languages, but for international communications it will be computer language.

Interviewer : Now that everything is centering on the West Coast, there appears to be a rift between California and the East Coast of the United States.

Wilson : Oh yes, if you follow this trajectory I’ve been talking about, you’ll see the conflict. Every New York intellectual eventually goes to California and comes back and writes a book denouncing it.

This just follows the pattern of the rift between France and England back around 1750 when the center of knowledge and power was shifting towards England, and the rift between Italy and France a few centuries before that; and, of course, the Roman/Greek conflict, and the conflict the Greeks had with the Persians, etc. A great deal of history is just a rising center in the west growing over an earlier power center in the east. Nietzsche pointed out that the earlier one is in the east, one sits down and writes pessimistic books about the meaninglessness of life and their moral superiority to the western barbarians. This repeats over and over during millenniums.

Interviewer : Maybe this is one reason Ronald Reagan is President as he comes from the West Coast?

Wilson : If you study American politics since 1950, you will see this constant conflict between east and west. Carl Oglesby, a very important American historian, talks about the Yankee and Cowboy war. And if you look at the Yankee and Cowboy war as part of American politics, all the conspiracy theories going around begin to make some sense. I don’t mean the more paranoid theories are true. But if there was a conspiracy connected with any of the assassinations, it’s obviously part of the struggle between the Yankees and the Cowboys. It sometimes looks like they are not only struggling with each other economically, but it sometimes turns into a shooting war. It’s interesting that what we have in the States right now is not just Reagan representing the Cowboy interests, but as Vice President, you’ve got George Bush, former director of the CIA, Yale graduate, a long time associate of New York banking firms that represent the Eastern financial interests of the Yankees. So it is a coalition government; although it isn’t really, it’s the two groups trying to cooperate. And when Reagan got shot, my first thought was, “Well, maybe the Yankees are trying to promote Bush.

Interviewer : Do you think there will be more and more of a planetary consciousness?

Wilson : I think the natural political unit has been growing larger throughout history. It has gone from the tribal stage to the stage now where the world is broken up into about four major blocks of nations. To a large extent the Western alliance (NATO/European Economic Community) does work as a unit although it frequently fights among its parts. Then, there is the Communist block. Then, you have that little amazing country of Japan which is becoming a major power all on its own. It is semi-independent although not totally independent of these big groups. Finally, you have Communist China which is not quite part of the Russian block. They are feuding with them. Then there are the unaligned nations, of course.

But the world has never been so organized before; because, throwing out the unaligned nations for a moment for our analysis, we basically have four major centers which has never existed before in history. It is moving toward a decrease. We will have three major power centers and then two and then one. Then, I think we will be able to survive the Nuclear Age – once there is only one world power. Nuclear war becomes increasingly less likely. So, I’m all for accelerating the process of the transfer of power to one center.

Interviewer : Another loop which is very difficult for people to break out of is nationalism although that seems to be breaking down.

Wilson : Well, I think nationalism is very regressive at this point in history. But I realize it as a potent force. And so, it seems to me that we are going to have a decentralized world system in which, as much as possible, nationalism is retained while the power to use weapons is gradually taken away from nations, and given to some kind of peace force. The UN is a crude attempt at what obviously has to happen, and it should happen. The attitude of the major powers is that “It can’t happen until we knock over those bad guys over there,” but it has to happen eventually with a transformed UN with real power to keep the peace, or we’re going to exterminate ourselves.

We are evolving in that direction. You can see the historical trajectory. We are moving more and more toward world power. The problem is to do it in such a way that all the nationalists in the world won’t be fighting it. So, world management must give something to everybody and not take away their sense of nationalism. Cultural nationalism should be encouraged as much as possible. People should be proud of French culture, proud of English culture, proud of German culture, and so on. Keep their languages and their traditions.

As much as possible, world management should be decentralized so that there will be a great deal of feedback from local units. I think it should be something like the Articles of Confederation which the United States lived under for more than a decade before the Constitution. There they had a national government, but it had virtually no power, and the States retained their independence. It turned out that couldn’t work because they needed a national government to defend themselves against Europe. But I think that’s the first step to form a confederation of that sort with a great deal of veto power in each nation so that they are not too nervous about giving up their powers. And then, gradually it will evolve more, I think, toward a real peace keeping force.

Interviewer : What are your thoughts concerning alternative currencies and/or planetary currency?

Wilson : Well, that’s a complicated issue. I think the whole international banking system is going to have to change. The monopolization of currency by private bankers is unquestionable these days. Just as the Inquisition was unquestionable in the early 18th century. But, I think it’s obviously inappropriate. Every nation is to some extent in debt to these private bankers. Some nations are suffering horribly from it. People are being taxed to the point which they can’t stand it anymore, and nobody knows anyway out of the system. There is for individual nations no way out because any nation that defaults on its payments to the international banks will have their credit cut off and will go into an even worse economic decline. So it’s very hard to break the chain. But, I think it has to be broken.

The issue of currency by private individuals for their own profit is against the public interest. It is in the interest of the people of the world collectively to have currency created by some international organization, not for profit but to make trade easier and more rapid. Currency should be issued as a lubricant of the international trade machinery. And it isn’t today. It’s issued by the private bankers in terms of how much interest they can make by issuing it, which means that they expand the currency when they can make a lot of interest and they contract it when they can’t make a lot of interest. And everybody is their victims. I used to know an old economist name Larry Labadie who had a picture of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Board in the United States which controls the currency. It’s a private bank. Whenever people would discuss psychology he would point to a picture of them. “You know what they are doing?” he would ask, “they are making decisions which will in the following year create five million new ulcers, ten million new heart attacks and twenty million new psychiatric patients.” I think there is a very important point being made.

C.H. Douglas presented a graph to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 showing that as the interest rate rises, the suicide rate rises; as the interest rate drops, the suicide rate drops. His graph was from 1812 to 1932. Psychologists who don’t think about factors like that are ignoring the context of their own science.

Interviewer : How about taxation?

Wilson : Well, there is an incredible amount of taxation that people are paying these days and what they are complaining about is debt. It’s just going into building these weapons of megadeath which are the greatest collective insanity of the human race because if they are never going to be used, that’s a hell of a waste of money; and, if they are going to be used, that’s the end of the human race. So, whether they are going to be used or not, it’s collective insanity to spend so much money on such hellish bombs.

But, the main cause of high taxes is the fact that the issue of currency is controlled by private bankers and every government is in debt to them to a huge extent. I read recently that 90% of the Irish budget goes into paying their debt to the bankers. No politician in Ireland has the effrontery to say, “Let’s repudiate our debt.” They can’t, and if they did, all credit would be cut off and Ireland would be thrown into an even worse state of chaos.

People think that only the banks can create money. That’s a hallucination. Aleister Crowley tells in his autobiography of a part of Mexico during the Revolution where there was no money available, so the people in the town just wrote on pieces of paper, “I owe you five pesos,” or whatever. And they were using these pieces of paper while the town went right along and got more prosperous because they weren’t paying interest every time they created money.

In the 1930s in Wörgle, Austria, the Mayor issued private money just for the city, and Wörgle became the most prosperous city in Austria. They built a new bridge, industry and local business thrived. And when the Bank of Austria found out about it, they had it suppressed.

In the U.S. in the 1930s during the Great Depression there were over a thousand different private currencies in circulation until the Federal Reserve found out about it and had it stopped.

You and I could start our own private currency system just by writing pieces of paper back and forth. We could trade with each other that way. If we kept quiet about it, the bankers wouldn’t even stop us. When gets on a larger scale, the bankers would find out about it and have it stopped. But God did not give them the magic to create money and to take that right away from everybody. Anybody can create money. It’s just a huge imposture by which the bankers have convinced the world that they are the only ones who know the magic that creates money.

So the UN should create an international money for its member nations which would be non-interest-bearing since it would be a cooperative venture by all the nations. The result: they would all simultaneously get out of hock to the international bankers which would accelerate world trade and break down barriers between peoples.

Interviewer : You call God, It, a neuter pronoun, instead of He. This concept might be difficult for some people to grasp.

Wilson : Actually I started that back in 1959. I was reading Science and Civilization by Joseph Needham, and I was thinking that I agree with the Taoists more than any other religion. And I started asking myself why. It occurred to me that in the Western World Judaism, Christianity and Islam all refer to God as He. That creates an image of a cosmologically huge human being and, I thought, “Now I can’t take that literally.” Yet, at the same time, although I’m not absolutely convinced, I do have a very strong intuition of some kind of cosmic intelligence. I’m an agnostic on the level of not being passionately convinced. I just have a strong intuition of cosmic intelligence.

I thought, “Cosmic intelligence is not a gaseous vertebrate,” which was Thomas Henry Huxley’s description of the Christian God. It does not have a penis, so it is not a “He”. I can’t think of it as an Eastern potentate or king. All the Christian symbology, “Our Almighty King or Lord,” “Our Great Father,” etc., seems to me to be a continuation of infantile thinking projected onto the universe. I don’t think the universe is a punishing father. I don’t think it has any of the traits of an old paranoid man. It’s impossible for me to think of cosmic intelligence peeking into bedrooms, taking notes and giving people gold stars for making love the right way and black stars for doing it the wrong way. All that seems absurd to me. So, I can’t take Christianity seriously as an intellectual force. It’s a continuation of infantile anxieties. And so, the same goes for Judaism and Islam. As far as the Western World is concerned, I’m an atheist.

But I do have a strong intuition of cosmic intelligence, and I find Buddhism quite compatible. But I find Taoism even more compatible. So, I prefer to speak of cosmic intelligence as It rather than He. And so, I wrote all this in 1959 in a magazine called, “The Realist” and recently republished it in a book called Right Where You Are Sitting Now.

Meanwhile, in the United States, since I wrote that, there has been a big upsurge of Woman’s Liberation. A bunch of extreme feminists have started referring to God as She. They were searching for a genderless term and nobody seems to be willing to settle for It, so they coined terms like Shim and so on. It amuses me that they are coming so close to my approach which is why I republished that article.

Interviewer : The concept of a neuter God might be difficult for some Europeans to grasp. For example, the French do not have a neuter pronoun in their language; it’s either he (il, masculine) or she (elle, feminine). There is no it pronoun in French.

Wilson : Oh, that’s interesting because I don’t know French at all. In German you’ve got he, she and it, just like in English. It would be even harder for the French. Well, that just shows one of the dominant themes of my writing, an idea I got from Benjamin Lee Whorf, which is, language controls our thinking.

Interviewer : Martin Buber talks about an “I-Thou” relationship with God. What do you feel about a personal relationship? If God is neuter, does it lessen your reverence?

Wilson : I have reverence for a great many things: trees, flowers, animals, children and some adults, art, Beethoven, Bach, mathematics, great scientists, the sun and moon and stars, and the ocean and rivers . . . To quote T.S. Eliot, whom I generally don’t agree with, “I don’t know much about gods but I think the river is a strong, brown god.” I feel all things are full of gods. So, I have reverence for a great deal.

I feel that cosmic intelligence is decentralized rather than centralized. So I can’t feel an I-Thou relationship. By Buber’s standards, I’m some kind of barbarian. I just don’t feel an I-Thou with God.

Do you remember Samuel Butler’s attack on Darwin? When I read it, it seemed to me that Butler was very right and very wrong at the same time. He said Darwin banished mind from the universe. And I thought, no, he didn’t; he just decentralized it. Every biological system is intelligent, if you really understand what Darwin is saying. But, it’s not a centralized intelligence; it’s a decentralized intelligence. Darwin’s ruling metaphor is the tangled bank, with every plant trying to maintain its own space to expand its roots, and the whole system is intelligent.

I think ethnology has more and more demonstrated that the biosphere is an intelligent organism. Lovelock and Margulis refer to earth as Gaia. They regard the whole biosphere as one intelligent being. Now, I’m very inclined to believe that, and I’m inclined to think that probably on a higher level, the galaxy is an intelligent being. So, I tend to see intelligence as being hierarchical and decentralized. I think every cell in my body is intelligent, my organs are intelligent on a higher level than the cells, and my body is intelligent on a higher level, and the human race is intelligent on a higher level. So, I see myself as a middle part of a hierarchy or intelligence, but it’s decentralized. I just don’t see it all culminating in one central computer. I think it’s a rather decentralized computer in the sense of Bell’s Theorem: every part of the system has a mysterious connection to every other part.

Interviewer : You’ve mentioned Teilhard de Chardin who talks about a noosphere as a sphere of human thought. Could you explain what that is?

Wilson : Well, the noosphere is the mental part of existence. Consider the mental as having an existence that you can think about, although I know some materialists try to pretend it doesn’t exist. It palpably does. When I talk to you, obviously I’m feeding things from my mind into yours. When you talk to me, your mind is feeding stuff to me. And I can communicate with dogs and they can communicate with me. I have a certain amount of success in communicating with all life forms. By experimenting I found, to some extent, I can communicate with plants.

I think the noosphere, the sphere of thought, is evolving just like the physical sphere. Mental evolution is a process of thought becoming more and more coherent and complex and synergetic, and so, humanity is a great step forward in evolution. So are the dolphins and whales. They seem to have a great deal of noetic activity going on too.

I think the noosphere is evolving very rapidly. I agree with Buckminster Fuller that wealth is created out of thought. Most economists say that wealth is created out of land, labor and capital. Marx said that capital is a false bookkeeping system. I think wealth is created out of ideas. One of my favorite metaphors is, “You can starve in the middle of a wheat field if your mind hasn’t identified wheat as edible.” Nobody knows how many resources there in a cubic meter of universe. It takes mind to find out how many resources that cubic meter contains. And so, wealth is the manifestation of the noosphere.

Interviewer : Don’t you refer to a field of mental substance as an EMIC reality?

Wilson : EMIC realities are the realities created by people communicating with each other. It’s one of the major discoveries of the social sciences in the last 80 years that a very large percentage (nobody has found a way of mathematically estimating it, but a very large percentage) of what we experience is EMIC reality. A large percentage of what we experience just exists because our society has talked it into existence.

To give a vivid example, Othello murdered Desdemona because of a purely EMIC reality. There was the cultural assumption that a husband should murder an unfaithful wife, which has nothing to do with physical reality, it’s just a cultural assumption. And there was the secondary assumption that Iago was telling the truth.

So EMIC realities are very powerful. Six million Jews died because of an EMIC realtiy. That reality was as real as the guns and bombs of the war because that reality was believed in.

People are hungry in a lot of places today because of EMIC reality. There is enough food on the planet to feed everybody, but we exist in an EMIC reality in which – because we’re not working together but against one another – collectively we cannot figure out how to feed those people. But the food is here. The food is really here; the potential is here. For 50 years the United States government has been paying farmers not to grow too much food. The only way they can keep the economic system going is by paying farmers not to grow food while people are starving. Now that’s obviously an EMIC reality that’s killing people every day. and it’s come into existence through thought. – through wrong thoughts, in my opinion. If we think correctly, we’ll know how to feed those people.

Interviewer : Would you explain synergetics more fully, a term coined by Buckminster Fuller?

Wilson : I was ready to understand Fuller as soon as I encountered him because I had read Korzybski first. Korzybski talks about “non-elementalistic” relationships and “non-linear” relationships. In the real universe, quite often, when you put two things together, it is not like putting apple one together with apple two, and all you have is two apples. In many relationships in the universe, you put two things together, you get a third thing: you get something completely new.

The word “synergy” Fuller got from metallurgy. It’s been used in metallurgy for several centuries and it refers to alloying. When you smelt two metals together, you get a new metal that has properties that neither of the first two had. And Fuller began to notice that there were synergies in every science, not just metallurgy. And so, he coined the word synergy to describe non-linear, non-elementalistic relationships. He is always looking for non-additive relationships where you can put two and two together and get five instead of four. You get more because of the new structure created when you put the parts together. That’s why his domes are up to a thousand time stronger than any other structure containing the same space built by traditional geometry. His domes are all synergetic.

Interviewer : Fuller actually invented a new mathematics based on synergetics.

Wilson : Yes, synergetic geometry is all based on non-additive relationships. It’s demonstrated to work more thoroughly than anything in the history of architecture. There are 300,000 Fuller domes on this planet now. His is the most successful architecture in history, in the sense of getting his work spread around the planet. These domes are stronger and cheaper than anything built by Euclidian geometry because he does not believe in straight lines. Every dome is based on the curve which he thinks is the natural synergetic shape. Following that thought consistently, he has improved over the years. His first domes were only a hundred times stronger than cubical structures. Now he’s got them up to a thousand and two thousand times stronger. They are getting lighter and lighter and stronger and stronger.

Interviewer : And people are actually living in these domes.

Wilson : Oh yes, not only people, vast business enterprises are in Fuller domes now. Actually more of them are used by businesses than by families. Fuller expected that too. He figured out in 1928 the time lag in various fields. In aviation it’s two years between an invention and its application. In office building, it’s thirty years. In homes, dwellings for people, it’s fifty years. So, he figured that it would take thirty years for his domes to be accepted as office buildings, and that’s happened. In the 1950s they started building Fuller domes all over the world for business purposes. In the 1980s it will really start spreading as private dwellings. Actually, it started in the 60s, but it’s still very small. I think for every Fuller dome that’s a home for people, there are about a thousand that are being used as factories and other business purposes. They can be built at any size. Building them for individuals is increasingly catching on. The 1980s should be the decade in which we see them appearing all over the world as dwellings for people.

Interviewer : I’ve also seen Fuller’s dymaxion map sold in bookstores which is another thing he created.

Wilson : It’s the only flat map that shows all the continents without any distortion.

Interviewer : At one time he was going to commit suicide which led to a major change in his life.

Wilson : It was in 1928. He stood on Lake Michigan and debated with himself whether to jump in because he had failed in business three times in a row. He felt he was some kind of freak. He wasn’t practical. He just wasn’t oriented to survival in the Capitalist system. He thought he’d always be a failure. He was ready to jump in, but then he thought, since he had been raised by a very religious grandmother, that “if there is a God and He doesn’t make mistakes, then He had some reason in creating me.” So maybe, instead of jumping in, I should spend the rest of my life trying to figure out why God created Buckminster.” He spent the whole year trying to get rid of all the ideas he had ever learned so that he could start fresh and figure out what Buckminster Fuller was supposed to do in the universe. He decided, when he started talking again, that he was going to be a local problem solver.

Interviewer : He actually goes around solving problems. I heard him speak once. he suddenly stopped, turned towards a building and pointing, asked the audience, “How much do you think that building over there weighs?” He’s quite an eccentric.

Wilson : He’s one of the great eccentrics of all time. He does that to architects. He gets invited to speak to a group of architects and he asks them, “How much does this building weigh?” And none of them know. Then he gives them hell. “There’s not a ship builder in the world who doesn’t know what his ship weighs; there isn’t an airplane designer in the world who doesn’t know what his airplane weighs, and you’re putting up houses and you don’t even know what they weigh. Don’t you think it’s time you learn a little science?”

He has also designed a floating city which I presume will exist in the next fifty years.

Interviewer : One of the subjects we might broach are extraterrestrials. What’s your opinion?

Wilson : Seeming extraterrestrials . . . I’m fascinated by UFO contact stories because they are so obviously mythological. It’s a very interesting thing about contemporary humanity: all of these things happen to our ancestors are still happening to us. Rationalism hasn’t had any effect whatsoever. These events are still happening. You still have bleeding Catholic statues. You still have fire walkers in the South Seas, in Indonesia and other places. You still have fairies and leprechauns in Ireland. Just a few years ago a fellow named McGuire sued the Crumland Fair for losing his leprechaun. He found a dead leprechaun in Phoenix Park and was exhibiting it at the Crumland Fair. They lost it and he is suing them in Dublin Court.

Poltergeist rapping goes on in houses. Furniture flies around. Mysterious fires. All these things continue. The only things that’s changed are the rationalists who are saying, “It didn’t happen. People were just hallucinating” which I find a rather droll explanation because one can get rid of the data that way. You can say chemists are just hallucinating molecules.

In 1919 at Fatima, Portugal over 100,000 people saw a bright light descend from the sky, rose petals fell, everybody smelled perfume, and saw lights flashing. The rationalists say “mass hallucination.” The Catholics say it’s “a miracle by the Blessed Virgin.” I say “it’s some unknown property of the human mind.”

Getting back to the extraterrestrials, they may be extraterrestrials for all I know, but I’m far from convinced. Most UFO contacts show all the stigmata of ancient records of encounters with gods and satyrs and nymphs, and medieval accounts of encounters with the fairy folk which you still hear in Ireland. When I first arrived in Ireland one of the first radio shows I heard was with a professor who collects legends. The interviewer said, “You sound like you believe in fairies yourself.” The professor replied, “I’m not saying I do, but I’m not saying I don’t” which is a typical Irish answer. And it’s my attitude and maybe it’s why I’m in Ireland. That’s my attitude towards most things: I’m not saying it is but I’m not saying it isn’t. Getting back to de Bono, I like to consider alternative hypotheses.

To be wildly speculative, I think they may well exist. They have been around as long as humanity. They may be playing games with us. On the other hand, it’s very likely they only exist in the collective unconsciousness of mankind. And so, they are a special kind of group hallucination. If so, I think they are not a mere hallucination in the rationalist’s sense because they leave visible signs behind. UFO cases often leave burn marks on the ground, or television sets go off and on, or in thousands of cases, automobile engines stall. So I think if they are mass hallucinations then they involve psychokinesis which is very interesting. I suspect that was what was happening in Fatima too. Maybe 30,000 believers at the scene created a psychic field strong enough to affect 70,000 others hundreds of miles around there.

In Carl Jung’s book on flying saucers, which I think is one of the most intelligent, he says UFOs show that there is a shift in the constellation of the architypes of the collective unconscious. I think that’s a plausible working hypothesis. The unconscious has taken an extraterrestrial form at this time because we’re ready to become extraterrestrials ourselves. I think we’ll be leaving this planet in great numbers in the next fifty years.

Interviewer : Quite a few people are now using quantum physics rather than psychology to explain extra sensory perception.

Wilson : It fascinates me that Albert Einstein tossed off a remark once which is frequently quoted out of context. He said to Niels Bohr that he did not believe in telepathy. Then he said, “But if it does exist, it probably has more to do with physics than psychology.” The second sentence is often quoted but they don’t quote that he didn’t believe in it. Einstein changed his mind about that later. He was very impressed with Upton Sinclair’s research on ESP. I think Einstein was on the right track and I think the physicists today who are thinking along those lines are on the right track.

Parapsychology may be the wrong approach entirely. If we are going to explain things like thought transfer, I think the explanation does lie in the area of quantum physics, not psychology, and the explanation is going to turn out to be a corollary to Bell’s theorem. Most ESP outside the laboratory, or most anecdotal ESP, most scientists say that anecdotal evidence is no evidence. But I feel that if there is enough anecdotal evidence, you should at least think about it.

Most anecdotal evidence concerns ESP between members of the same family. I find that very significant. It obviously has something to do with physical contact. A hell of a lot of ESP involves mothers and children. They were once part of her body. Thet seems to me to fit right in with Bell’s theorem: the idea that things once connected remain always in contact even though they are separated.

And of course, this is the traditional theme in romantic poetry. I’m very science oriented in many ways. So much so that a lot of people who hate science dislike my books because they dislike the scientific emphasis. But, at the same time I am science oriented, I don’t reject other modes of knowledge. When I find something repeated over and over, my thought is, if enough people have thought this over for many centuries, it’s worth looking at no matter how wild it sounds. And the fact that in romantic poetry from the Orient, from Ancient Egypt, even in American Indian poetry, you find the thought repeated over and over that lovers are never separated; well, I think that has to do with Bell’s Theorem. I think it’s a genuine intuition and not just poetic metaphor. Even though I can’t prove it scientifically, it’s what I suspect. I don’t think you have to prove everything. You should be open to speculation about things that can’t be proven or disproven.

I like logical positivism as a technique of distinguishing what we know and what we don’t know. But I don’t like it when the logical positivist says that what we don’t know, we shouldn’t talk about anymore. I think there is no sense in stopping thought at any point. The thing is, to know what you’re talking about is what you don’t know, and admit you’re speculating. That’s proper semantic hygiene, not to stop thinking entirely but to admit you are speculating.

Interviewer : A lot of things are discovered spontaneously and then science plods along afterwards methodically explaining what occurred.

Wilson : Oh yes, there are a lot of things that have been known for centuries before we had a scientific explanation for them. Medieval grimoires tell about witches using bee balm for people with heart disease and, of course, bee balm contains digitalis. It’s just what modern doctors use. Somehow the witches had learned empirically over millenniums of being village herbalists what herbs really work.

Interviewer : You’re a member, I believe, of the L5 Society. Could you explain what it is and what they hope to accomplish?

Wilson : The L5 Society is a group of scientists and other interested parties who got together to advance an idea which we think is a very good idea which is Gerard O’Neill’s plan for building colonies in space.

O’Neill’s thought is that the surface of the planet is not the right place for an advanced technology. And I think with all the ecological chaos going on, that point does not have to be argued.

So there are basically two attitudes towards advanced technology. One, that we shouldn’t have it at all and we should go back to the Dark Ages which is an idea I oppose vehemently. I don’t think people were happy in the Dark Ages. I don’t think returning to a thirty year lifespan and continuous attacks of bubonic plague and smallpox and the other desiderata of those centuries would do us any good at all. So, I like O’Neill’s alternative which is move the technology off planet and put it in colonies. The energy could be beamed down to earth easily.

There are all sorts of attractive features about space colonies. They would have to be designed intelligently because of the expense of putting people up there in the first place. They would have to be designed to work. It would give us a vast chance to experiment with designing human societies that work. We have never done that before. All human societies have evolved in a haphazard way. For instance, a space colony would have to be designed not to have a crime problem. You wouldn’t want a crime problem in outer space where technologists are converting solar energy into other forms of energy for use on the planet.

You would have to design a space colony very intelligently. I think the discoveries made in designing such colonies would be very valuable on earth in teaching us how to run our societies better.

Also, I think there is a natural desire in the human species to explore and to expand and go further. I think that’s why we’re spread over the whole planet. And there is not much more space to expand on the planet so it’s time we start expanding off it. This is a great romance to many people. Some are so technical that they hate to admit it, but you can see it in their eyes. There is a great romance about going to new worlds. People were always saying, “Let’s go see what’s on the next mountain.” I don’t think you can wipe out that drive. People who say it is pathological, promethean, and so on, just misunderstand the variety of humanity. Some of us always want to solve the next mystery and go over the next mountain. I think space is going to be a rebirth of hope and adventure, just like the Renaissance. People will have a great sense of adventure, exploration and vast new possibilities when we start expanding into space. We will get back onto the track of real human trajectory which is explorative and innovative. A great deal of despair these days is because people don’t know where to go. They don’t know where the new frontier lies. People even write books saying there is no more frontier. Well, Gerard O’Neill’s books about his space plans is called The High Frontier.

Interviewer : A lot of astronauts, who have returned from having been out in space, have had a change in consciousness.

Wilson : That’s another thing that interests me very much. Some 85% of Americans and Russians who have been in space have had consciousness changes. I have been studying consciousness change for a long time and have experimented a great deal with methods of consciousness alteration, and reading the literature on this, including the Russian literature in translation, it’s obvious that the transformations they have gone through are similar to those called enlightenment in Buddhist and Eastern traditions. So, it seems to me, that what you get through yoga meditation, happens when you go into space too. And that does not surprise me. In the human nervous system there are always several ways of accomplishing the same effect. It’s a fascinating thought to think that when people are going into space, they will all be becoming mystics. We will have a whole new human race out there.